This notice gives you a clear explanation about how the University of East Anglia (and any third parties we work with) collect and use your personal information and explains:
The University of East Anglia (UEA) is a public research university based in Norwich, England. UEA is a registered data controller of your information, which means we collect, use and store personal information about you as an Alumni of UEA.
For the purposes of this notice Alumni is defined as any individual who has undertaken a course based at or delivered by UEA including those who have undertaken undergraduate or postgraduate taught courses or postgraduate research and may include honorary graduates, fellows, visiting students and those who have undertaken short courses and other non-credit bearing courses at UEA.
If you are also a Friend or Supporter of UEA, please read our Friends and Supporters Privacy Notice below this privacy notice.
We do our utmost to protect your privacy. We have security systems and procedures to protect information from unauthorised disclosure, misuse, or destruction.
During your involvement with UEA as a student we will have collected a great deal of information about you. As set out in our Applicant and Student Privacy Notice, we will continue to hold this data, ordinarily for six years after the end of your course, after which time, we will reduce this to a core record consisting of your personal details, identification information, enrolment status, academic details and financial information, which we need to keep indefinitely as part of our public task as a provider of higher education.
During your involvement with UEA as alumni, the following personal information is collected, used, and stored securely by us:
UEA will have collected some of this information about you during your studies and will have transferred this data to our alumni database when you graduated.
A significant proportion of the information we process is provided by you to us, for example by filling in forms on our website or by corresponding with us by telephone, email, face-to-face, etc.
We occasionally augment the data we hold about you with information from publicly available sources and third party organisations. Where relevant, we use targeted internet searches and search various websites to obtain and maintain the accuracy of data we hold.
The information we get from other organisations may depend on your privacy settings or the responses you give to these websites. We recommend that you check these settings regularly.
We will only use your personal data for the purposes for which we collected it, unless we consider that we need to use it for another related reason and that reason is compatible with the original purpose. If we need to use your data for an unrelated purpose, we will seek your consent to use it for that new purpose.
This includes, but is not limited to:
For all administration relating to any of the following:
Access to and the sharing of this kind of ‘special category’ personal information has extra protection. Where we do use your sensitive personal information, we will either have obtained your explicit consent or there will be a substantial public interest reason with a basis in law.
The reasons for using this information include to prevent or detect unlawful acts, to protect the public, or to address safeguarding issues. It may also include the monitoring of disability data to facilitate access to buildings; information about race and ethnicity for monitoring our responsibilities under the Equality Act 2010; medical information required to provide learning support. Other reasons to use this information would be for employment, social security, and social protection purposes (such as public health issues, accidents or occupational health etc).
UEA may share your information with third parties where there is a legitimate or legal reason to do so or because you asked us to.
These external organisations may include:
JISC/Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), the Home Office, UK Visas and Immigration, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Department of Health, Department of Education, HM Revenue and Customs, Health & Safety Executive, Office for Students (OFS), Student Loans Company (SLC), funding bodies, relevant professional or statutory regulatory bodies and other course accrediting organisations, local authorities, the police, and other law enforcement agencies.
Software providers, insurers, auditors, event hosts, mailing houses, providers of alumni related services eg data cleansing providers, alumni relations & development programme agencies, due diligence, wealth screening, research & statistical providers.
We will not normally disclose your personal information to other external organisations without your consent unless it is in the event of a medical emergency.
Where UEA shares your information with any organisation based outside the UK, appropriate safeguards will be in place to protect your personal information.
Educational and research partners, funders and donors.
We will keep your personal information only as long as it is necessary for the purpose it was collected and in accordance with UEA’s records retention schedule. This means that, in normal circumstances, your alumni data will be kept for as long as you support your relationship with the University, or until you request us to do otherwise, whilst your core data will be kept indefinitely as part of our public task as a provider of higher education.
UEA will always store your personal information safely and will never disclose it to any other person unlawfully.
Under data protection law, you have rights including:
Please note, these rights are not absolute and the requirement for UEA to comply with your request depends on the purpose for our processing. You do not need to pay any charge for exercising these rights. If you make a request, we have one month to respond to you.
Please contact UEA’s Data Protection Officer at dataprotection@uea.ac.uk if you would like any further information; if you wish to exercise any of your data rights; if you believe your personal information has been breached; or if you have any other concerns about how your personal information is being used by UEA.
If you are still not happy after you have spoken to us, you can contact the ICO:
Online - Contact us - public | ICO or by phone - ICO Helpline number: 0303 123 1113
We keep our privacy notices under regular review.
This privacy notice was last updated on 04-06-2025.
UEA Friends and Supporters Privacy Policy
The privacy and data security of our alumni, friends and supporters is important to us at UEA. Our community of supporters is a diverse, global group, which includes students, alumni, staff, institutional contacts, donors, mentors, event attendees, employers, policy-makers, supporters and advocates. We enable people to become informed and involved with the University through research, engagement, outreach and fundraising activities. This statement explains how UEA uses personal data for engagement, fundraising and alumni relations purposes.
Through our communications, events and activities we aim to build strong and meaningful lifelong relationships with our global community. We carry out research to better understand our alumni and supporters’ relationship with UEA and to help us identify your interests and potential for supporting the University.
In order to deliver these opportunities, services and products in a bespoke manner and to ensure each individual and group receives relevant information, UEA processes the personal data of our alumni, friends and supporters. This helps to ensure that you are getting the most relevant and interesting communications from the University for your interests and purposes. This also helps us, where appropriate, to ask for your support with the things we believe you care about the most.
If you have any questions about how we process your personal data or if you wish to opt-out of certain types of processing or communications, please contact the University’s Data Protection Officer by email. The University web pages contain further information on data protection.
What information do we hold about you?
Depending on your relationship with UEA, personal data held and processed by the University may include:
In instances where we believe that you could help the University meet its strategic goals through donations of time and/or money, we may also research and record the following information:
Your ability and willingness to make donations, including our assessment of your income and whether particular donations or funding appeals may be of interest to you (this is assessed through publically available information),
Your philanthropy and other giving, including donations to other organisations (which you may tell us about, or which we may learn of through the media) and other support that you provide to the University (such as mentoring, careers help and event speaking).
The information we hold about you comes from a number of sources. If you are a student or studied at UEA, some of your personal data is transferred from your student record to the University’s alumni database when you graduate. A significant proportion of the information we hold is provided by you to us, for example you may give us information by filling in forms on the University’s website or by corresponding with us by telephone, email, face-to-face or otherwise.
We occasionally augment the data we hold about you with information from publically available sources. Where relevant, we use targeted internet searches and may search the following websites (either directly or using search engines) in order to obtain and maintain the accuracy of data we hold. Examples of such publically available sources include:
Public sources for companies (in order to find information about the company and specific employees):
Companies House and other business related resources for UK companies (FAME for one example)
US Securities and Exchange Commission for US companies
Company websites
Public sources for charities (in order to find data of those charities’ employees, trustees, and to find information about donations and support):
Charity Commission and other internet sources for UK non-profits
Foundation Center for US non-profits
Public sources for individuals:
Sunday Times Rich List
Other rich list (Forbes Magazine’s international rich lists for example)
Property websites
The Queen’s Honours Lists
Data cleansing services (which may incorporate National Change of Address and BT Osis data)
LinkedIn, to check business details
Bloomberg profiles
Press sources (newspaper articles and databases) which may include media monitoring (such as Google alerts)
As part of standard fundraising practice, if you are preparing to donate a significant gift to UEA we will carry out due diligence research to ensure that donations are compatible with the University’s values and objectives and are consistent with its strategic goals.
The data we collect is used by the University to support a full range of activities for our alumni, friends and supporters. We use data: to communicate with you, to fundraise and help the University meet its strategic goals, and for administrative purposes. The table below outlines where we gather the information necessary to carry out these activities and our legal basis for processing this information for these activities. Where we use legitimate interests to process information, we have carried out a balancing exercise which considers our need to process information against your privacy rights. To view this balancing exercise, please contact the University’s Data Protection Team by email.
1. To communicate with you
i. How we use your information
ii. Where this information comes from
iii. Our legal basis for processing this information
2. To help the University meet its strategic goals, including fundraising
3. For administrative and legal purposes
Our data will be used primarily by the University’s Alumni, Events and Development Offices. Where appropriate and permitted, these offices may share data on a confidential basis with other UEA departments, including the Sainsbury Centre.
Sharing with External PartiesWe do not sell your personal data to third parties or share it for any commercial purposes. We also will not permit third parties to sell on the data we have shared with them, under any circumstances. We will not usually share your information with external parties, except in the following circumstances:
When transferring data to third-party processors, we make sure that data processing agreements are in place. If non-European Economic Area data processors are used, appropriate privacy safeguards are in place.
The University will retain your data indefinitely in support of your lifelong relationship with the University or until you request us to do otherwise. The data we retain indefinitely includes:
We review the data held on our database to ensure that it is accurate and relevant to our aims (to communicate with you, to fundraise and help the University meet its strategic goals, and to carry out administrative tasks). Where we find information which is out of date, inaccurate or no longer relevant, we remove this data.
Where you exercise your right to erasure, we will retain a core set of personal data ( such as name, education information, UEA ID number and date of birth) to ensure that we do not inadvertently contact you in the future and to maintain your academic record for archive purposes. We may also need to retain some financial records about you for statutory purposes (such as Gift Aid, anti-fraud and accounting matters).
For further detail about how we retain data, you can view the Development Office and the Alumni Office data retention policies.
The privacy and data security of our alumni, friends and supporters is important to us at UEA. UK and EU data protection laws give you a range of rights in relation to your personal data for example: erasure, rectification and subject access. Information about your rights can be found on the Information Commissioner’s website.
Where we use legitimate interests to process your data, we have carried out a balancing exercise which considers our need to process information against your privacy rights. To view this balancing exercise, opt-out of certain types of processing or communications, ask questions, or complain about how we process your personal data, please contact the University’s Data Protection Team by email.
You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office.
We continuously review records of alumni and supporters to ensure that your data is as accurate as possible. Alongside the research we proactively carry out, we may also consult alternative sources in order to undertake these checks, for example: Royal Mail address files, BT phone directories, reviewing job information that you have made publicly available via LinkedIn and other social media, newspaper articles, company websites and other publicly available sources.
Communications may be sent to you by post, telephone or electronic means (principally by email) depending on the contact details we hold and the preferences expressed by you about the types of communications you wish to receive. To let us know how you would prefer to keep in touch with UEA, to request no further communications from us, or if you have any questions about we process your personal data, please complete our Communications Preferences Form or email.
If you wish to correct any information held by the University about you, please contact the Alumni Office.
Alumni, friends and supporters may request a copy of the personal data held about them by UEA. If you wish to make such a request, please contact the University’s Data Protection Officer by email.
The controller for your personal data is the University of East Anglia.
We always handle your personal data securely and minimise its use and collection, and there is no overriding prejudice to you by using your personal information for these purposes.
The UEA website privacy statement explains how data may be gathered about users of the University’s website. The University’s privacy notices do not cover the links within the UEA site which link to other websites.
We regularly review the University’s privacy statements. This privacy statement was last updated in January 2018. We will publish on our website any changes we make to this privacy statement and notify you by other communication channels where appropriate.